The Westridge community gathered on Frank Field to celebrate the Class of 2026 during Commencement on June 5. Convocation, held on Frank Field, included remarks from Head of School Andrea Kassar, Commencement Speaker Lena Alfi ’05 (read her remarks here), Salutatorian A. Ko, and Adele B. Talbert Valedictorians Manon Iwata & Nina Krishnaiah.

Commencement Remarks by Andrea Kassar, Head of School (abridged)

You are an engaged and memorable class, Class of 2026. You are, according to your own thoughtful and accurate self-description, cooperative, creative, supportive of each other, outspoken, activists, open-minded, playful, politically engaged, passionate, funny, and “all in”—you put “your all” into everything that you do, you strive to make the world around you better. You have immersed yourself in every aspect of Westridge (truly, you have taken on all of it with care and humor and energy)—from the classroom, to the stage (front and back stage and playwrighting), to athletics, to leadership, to Student Voices, to Spyglass, to community service, to the ceramics and arts studios, to writing and math centers, to student life, to playing beautiful music together. You have spoken about the ways your class has had to grow up in high school at a complex time —from the fires, to the ethical challenges of AI, to the dizzying and often scary news cycles in a polarized country and world. And yet, through it all, you have maintained your optimism, energetic spirit, and sense of purpose. I have loved “growing up together” with all of you in Upper School during my first four years at Westridge.

At Chalk Day, I mentioned your inspiring leadership at our recent Town Meetings—the sense of gratitude and optimism that you brought to the space—that allowed our whole Upper School to feel more comfortable being honest and positive and vulnerable about their affection and gratitude for Westridge and for their lives. That’s such a wonderful thing.

While you will be all spread out next year and beyond—across the country and, in some cases, across the world—please know that you are always connected not only to each other but also to Westridge. As I said to you at the senior luncheon – and it’s true – I hear from alums of all ages that, despite very different and extraordinary life trajectories—despite college and graduate degrees, alums often feel that their lives have been shaped most fundamentally and meaningfully by the foundational learning, the lifelong friendships, and the sense of self they formed here at Westridge. I know that this will be true for you as well.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve heard this from me, but I am an English teacher, and there is nothing I love more than to analyze Tolstoy’s, or is it really Dostoevsky’s?, “One Fish, Two Fish”! (For those who don’t know, this is in reference to their senior skits last week.)

Ok, this speech isn’t about Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, but maybe you’ll agree it is still relatively “on brand” for me, as they say... many years ago I was thinking about the lyrics of one of my favorite songs, “All I really want,” which is the first song on Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, an album that came out in 1995, the summer I was exactly your age. Here are a few of the lyrics: “And all I really want is some patience/A way to calm the angry voice… And all I really want is deliverance/A place to find a common ground/And all I really want is some justice.”

The implication here is that what Morissette wants and what she really wants aren’t quite the same—that she hasn’t been able to say all of what she really wants, and so this song is a type of confessional that feels like an intensely freeing process. And this idea made me think of other songs that have the lyrics of “really want.” For instance, the Spice Girls: “I’ll tell you want I want, what I really really want.” Again, a female voice/perspective singing about the concept of “what I really want”—the under-layer, the actual, the deeper and truer thing—different from what she goes around saying she wants in a more public, everyday way. There was no doubt to me that there was something deeply gendered here. I remember thinking that it feels much harder to imagine a song with a male voice desperate to declare, “Hey, here’s what I really want!” with as much revelation and confession.

And then as I got older, I came across a quotation from feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan: in discussing her process of listening to girls speak, she writes: “My ears…prick up at the phrase ‘to be honest.’ Is it a prelude to a change in voice? A move into relationship? So that rather than saying what I say, I’ll say what I would say if I were to be honest... at what level of consciousness (are) people aware of making this shift, and also what prompts someone to do so… a human voice; to recognize that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice; and to realize that where patriarchy is in force and enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance.” Gilligan explains that this splitting between what the speaker says and what she really wants to say is “the voice of self-sacrifice.” Something less human. And I thought, oh wow, here is exactly the idea I had been thinking about all those years ago when I first heard Alanis’s song: “to be honest” is the same as “all I really want.” And of course, often, not saying what we really think or admitting what we really want can have a wise and long-term strategy to it, particularly in a world where saying true things could be dangerous or come with backlash.

All of this reminds me of my favorite line in our Westridge school song (the faculty and staff know all about this because I talk about it all the time!). But for those who don’t know, our school song Surgere Tentamus (we strive to rise) is based on our Latin motto. Our founder Mary Ranney had this song commissioned the year after Westridge began which was 1913. In the second verse, the lyrics go like this: “And yet within our Latin motto (so that is, surgere tentamus, we strive to rise) lies a hidden meaning too, and we’ll strive to learn its lesson in whatever things we do.”

When I first saw these lyrics I thought, "my goodness, how interesting—a hidden meaning!" What a mystery—how subversive and fun. And of course, we can’t know for sure what this hidden meaning is because unfortunately we can’t ask Mary Ranney, but remember that these lyrics were written in the backdrop of the suffragist movement. To claim openly that “we strive to rise” is rising to full citizenship, to the vote, could have been met with significant backlash. If this is so, then this message is certainly an activist and countercultural one—it is what we really want—a hidden meaning—a way to claim what we really want implicitly, in a world where we can only say half-truths aloud.

And indeed, women are often linked to the idea of subtext, even in art/culture and humor. Two similar New Yorker cartoons that I recall make this point. In the first one, a woman is saying to a man: “I know you got my text, but did you get my subtext?” And in the second one, two men are at a table, and one holding his cell phone says to the other, “She’s texting me, but I think she’s also subtexting me.” In both cases, it is the woman, not the man, who is depicted as a speaker of subtext. Perhaps because, as Gilligan notices, women are so often socialized to speak on two levels, subtext becomes a more common language.

But at what cost is all of this? Can saying what we want (but not what we really want) for many years lead to a forgetting, at least consciously, of what we really want? A kind of knowing that gets further and further away from conscious thought the longer it stays hidden. A separation from the self. But… I think this knowing still lives somewhere even when it is hidden or deeply embedded in subtext—perhaps in our physical body, maybe in our dreams.

Many of you studied the topic of adolescence in your Perspectives class this year. In the Voices in Literature assembly connected to this course, author Francesca Lia Block (of Weetzie Bat fame) spoke about a knowing in adolescence. I loved what she said: that often she feels that her younger self would give better advice to her older self than vice versa—and that is a reason for you all to trust the wisdom of your youth. The idea here is that there is a kind of adolescent intelligence and self-knowledge that might actually be closer to truth. A closeness to what we “really want” before it gets interrupted for many years by half-truths and harder to access. Maybe this is why people in midlife are advised to remember what they loved most as children and adolescents and take up those hobbies and passions once again to reclaim a feeling of authenticity and self-connection.

So here’s a hope I have for all of you: right now, as you are moving on from adolescence, try consciously and explicitly to express what you know so far that you really want—write those things down or say them to a trusted friend. And yes, what you really want will change and shift and grow and evolve as you age and discover new things about yourselves and about the world around you. But actually, I bet a lot of what you really want, at its deepest core, won’t change entirely. So, yes, use hidden meanings and subtexts strategically when necessary, but my hope is that you do not let too many years of hidden meanings or subtexts force you to lose conscious access to what you really want. Know your own real wants as best you can.

And if being in a forward-thinking girls’ school teaches you anything, it is also that this isn’t just an individual thing. TentaMUS is “we”—a collective. What are the collective things you really want—for women, for marginalized groups, for the world itself? Mary Ranney’s “really want” was to form a girls’ school to give girls access to the rigors of education their brothers were getting, and here we are 113 years later with a collective want of sending all of you amazing humans out into the world to be the courageous and compassionate leaders our world so desperately needs.

Now, when I listen to Alanis’s song, the “really want” for justice, for deliverance, for patience, for change has a broader perspective that comes with age, but its still always there on some level with the same fiery fervor it once had when I was your age. And in fact, one of the things I love most about being in a girls’ school and spending my days with adolescents is that it keeps what I really want in the foreground with a powerful sense of vitality and purpose. And I never ever want to lose that. And my greatest wish for all of you is that you never lose that either—that you go forth and love and relish your lives, honest and ever open to what you really want for yourselves, the people you love, and the world around you.

Congratulations, Class of 2026! We send you all profound Westridge love. Here’s to a life of knowing the inherent value of what you really, really want.